A few years ago, the people behind the now-defunct white nationalist website VDARE bought a castle (yes, a castle) in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. It got a fair bit of coverage at the time, but there hasn't been all that much reporting on what they've been doing in there since then.
Now it's clear that the castle was the venue for a recent conference that brought a bunch of Patriot Front goons to town, along with a handful of leading antisemitic and "race science" intellectuals from around the US. And this is after the VDARE people promised to be nice, quiet neighbors.
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On March 7-9 of this year, the neo-fascist American Freedom Party (AFP) held what it billed as its “National Convention” at a location that organizers kept secret from the public. Participants later said that it was in West Virginia without specifying where, however they did post photos from the conference online. A close examination of these images reveals that the conference took place at the Berkeley Springs Castle, which is owned by the people who ran the now-defunct white nationalist website VDARE.
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The Brimelows’ presence has been a source of tension in Berkeley Springs from the start. Peter Brimelow has downplayed residents’ concerns, saying that he wasn’t organizing big rallies in town or doing anything disruptive and that “We just want to be quiet, good neighbors.” Yet the VDARE website also described the castle as a “meeting place” for like-minded people, and Lydia Brimelow stated during a 2022 podcast appearance that “My vision is it becomes a big hub of American patriotism.”
One reason why the recent conference is noteworthy is because it provided exactly the kind of “meeting place” that VDARE promised while breaking any sort of commitment to simply be “quiet, good neighbors,” highlighting the inherent contradiction between the two.
https://alasbarricadas.noblogs.org/post/2025/03/31/a-fascist-gathering-in-west-virginia/
